Electronic mailboxes are used to store electronic mail (email) messages Electronic mailboxes are connected to the Internet to enable users to send and receive incoming and outgoing email messages. These mailboxes may also be extended to deliver email to mobile wireless communication devices via wireless networks. In the case of a corporation, electronic mailboxes are typically located on email servers at the corporation. On the other hand, mailboxes for small businesses or individuals are typically located on Internet service provider (ISP) email servers.
Mail user agents (MUAs) are applications which use a technique called polling to relay messages from the mail server to the mail program at a user's computer or mobile wireless communications device. A MUA is a program running either on a user's personal computing device (mobile or stationary), or on a shared email relay server that checks for new mail on behalf of a multitude of such users. More particularly, polling is the retrieval of incoming messages from other users at the mail server and delivery of these messages to the user's mailbox.
Generally speaking, a user will have to establish a profile or account so that a mail user agent on an email relay server can perform the desired polling operations. The mail user agent will need to know information such as the unique identifiers of the user's wireless device, as well as the appropriate account information for the email account(s) from which the user wants emails relayed to the handheld device. It is generally undesirable to use live customer support personnel to interface with users to provision new email accounts, as this increases the number of support staff required to support the customer base and, therefore, increases operating costs.
The more desirable approach is to use a Web interface so that customers can log on to an email relay system including the MUA and provide the necessary information through the Web interface to allow the email relay system to automatically provision the account. While such Web interfaces are relatively straightforward to serve to users using a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) based browser, such as on a personal computer (PC) or Mac, for example, this task becomes more difficult when attempting to serve up a Web interface to mobile device browsers. This is because wireless communications device browsers are typically not HTML-based browsers. Rather, many wireless communications device browsers typically use a less feature-rich markup language, namely the Wireless Markup Language (WML), due to the processing and memory constraints of mobile devices compared to a PC or Mac. However, as device computing capabilities continue to improve, some device manufacturers are beginning to implement browsers that support more sophisticated markup languages, such as the Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML), for example.
Because of the numerous types of wireless communications devices that are available, and the differences in browsers supported by different devices, serving up Web-based content to mobile devices in general can be problematic for content providers. To serve up content that is tailored to a specific device, some providers try to detect the type of device attempting to access their Web site so that they can determine what browser and feature capabilities the device has. One article which discusses some of the challenges and difficulties of wireless communications device detection is “The Mobile Device Detection Problem” by Brian Fling, available at mobiledesign.org. In this article, Fling discusses three potential approaches to making device detection work, namely a third-party translation service, a device detection API that publishers can point to for centralizing the device user-agents, and a reverse device detection scheme. Yet, Fling concludes that the tools to allow common Web content publishers to create mobile versions of their Web pages are not yet readily available, and that device detection remains a significant obstacle for Web content publishers.
Accordingly, improved approaches for tailoring Web-based content for different types of wireless communications device browsers are needed. This may particularly appropriate where a user is required to provide information through a wireless communications device Web browser, such as for email MUA provisioning, for example.